A good friend of mine is a notoriously slow eater. When we go out together, it is not uncommon for me to be completely finished with my meal only to notice that she has barely begun to eat. This is especially apparent if we're eating food that comes in measurable portions, like pizza, because in those situations, I can't just claim that I got a smaller serving than she did. I comment on this from time to time and she will usually respond with a shrug followed by a laugh and then, "I don't know... It's just how I grew up."
Knowing her family, that makes a lot of sense. In her house, dinner was a complete event. Her family talks about what they want to eat, sitting around the table flipping through old copies of Gourmet and Bon Appetit, recipe cards, and the latest Barefoot Contessa publication. Then they cook together. No single one person is responsible for feeding the whole family. Rather, the cooking process is creative, collective, and joyous. And eating is not an activity that is primarily a function of necessity but a way they could spend time together. Food, then, to her, was a form of intimacy, a way of forming one's relationships with other people. That could not have been farther from the way my family eats meals.
Neither of my parents especially love to cook. But not only is my mom wholly disinterested in cooking, she's also pretty disinterested in eating. By that I mean she will eat just about anything. If it was left up to her, we'd eat beans and rice all day long. My dad is fairly good at cooking but that is more about wanting to eat real food - if he wasn't cooking, my mom would be, and I use the word "cooking" loosely - than any love of the act. Meals in my family are not a social or collective process. Eating is just what you do when you're hungry. I think that way of thinking about food has been largely shaped by the hours my parents keep. Up until I was in middle school, there was always one parent that worked late at night. We couldn't eat together because by the time that the second parent came home, the first parent had already gone to bed. And I would eat two meals - one with each of them. Towards the end of middle school, my parents, because of their jobs, were living in separate cities. My dad would commute for an hour and a half to Portland, where my mom and I lived, from Corvallis where he stayed during the week. When my dad wasn't at home, my mom and I didn't make a big deal about meals. She didn't care one way or the other and I was perfectly happy having sandwiches and microwavable meals. They live in the same house now, but my mom gets up early to go to work and my dad stays late. We're not often in the same physical space when we need or want to eat.
There is, though, one dish that we make together: potstickers. My dad does all the prep work which for potstickers is the trickiest part. He takes the meat out of the freezer several hours in advance and lets it defrost in a bowl of cold water on the kitchen counter. As the meat defrosts, he chops vegetables - onions, cilantro, green onions, and other ingredients I don't know about. He haphazardly pulls bottles of soy sauce, sesame oil, and vegetable oil out of the cabinets. Then, minced garlic, whole peppercorns, and a small handful of dried anchilo chillies are deep fried in a shallow layer of oil. A minute or two later, everything, oil included, is poured into the mixed bowl along with the vegetables and ground meat.
My mom assembles all the pieces together. She breaks up the dough into golf-ball size pieces. They are dusted with flour and rolled out to a disk that's about 2 inches x 2 inches and then filled with the meat and vegetable mixture. Their edges are deftly pinched shut with a little bit of flour and they are set on a large, circular bamboo mat. The whole process lasts about 15 seconds. Those steps are repeated until the mat is completely full.
Once they're done cooking, my dad will eat first. He likes them when they're hot and my mom is busy cooking the other batches. She doesn't mind if they're a little bit cold - again, she'll eat anything. I don't mind either so I eat whenever I pass through the kitchen, or when I get hungry.
For the most part, the kitchen to my family is a transitory point - the place we go when we're on our way to somewhere else.
No comments:
Post a Comment